


you take the breath right out of me

by theviolonist



Category: One Direction (Band), X Factor RPF
Genre: F/F, Femslash, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-27
Updated: 2012-05-27
Packaged: 2017-11-06 02:44:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/413856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theviolonist/pseuds/theviolonist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You know her? Harry Styles, that's her name, and she's never lost a game of poker.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you take the breath right out of me

**Author's Note:**

> A bunch of really amazing people helped me with this, so thank you lookingatstars, aimmyarrowshigh and rumpledlinen, you're amazing and I love you. If anyone here plays poker, please forgive.

  
You know her? Harry Styles, that's her name, and she's never lost a game of poker.  
  
-  
  
She always wakes up the same way: in a bed full of creases, an arm thrown around hot skin, with dawn peeking red red through the curtains, screaming bloody murder. It's never too early to have a cigarette, so she rummages through her bag to find her pack of smokes. She doesn't bother trying to be quiet. Bitch was a pain, anyway.  
  
"Mm," the girl says as she opens her eyes.  
  
She probably thinks it's sexy, but Harry thinks she's fuck ugly with her red-rimmed, sleepy eyes and tangled limbs. People should never look that vulnerable. No wonder you'd want to hurt them. All that creamy skin, it's like it's begging to be maimed.  
  
Harry kind of wants to peek under the covers and look at the bruises she knows she left. Instead she stuffs the cig in her mouth and takes a jerky drag. Smoke tendrils curl around her fingers.  
  
"I'm going."  
  
"No, wait -" the girl – what's her name? Neela, Niall, something weird like that – says. Real women don't beg.  
  
She grabs Harry's arm, but Harry shakes her off. She falls back limply on the mattress, her tits bobbing on her chest. Her hair didn't look dyed last night.  
  
"You're a bastard," she spits.  
  
"Yeah, whatever," Harry says. She leaves, nostrils full of smoke, leather jacket on her shoulders and her pair of dice in her pocket, doesn't slam the door.  
  
-  
  
She grabs her sunglasses as soon as she's outside, blinded by this fucking sun that never sits still. There's alcohol dying on her tongue, remnants of vodka and girl sweat. She kind of wishes she'd brushed her teeth; she imagines that's what failure would taste like, acid in the crevices of her lips.  
  
Her feet don't need to be taught the way to the casino. She moves, but these cities are all the same, and she follows tracks like a hunter, slithering amongst the skyscrapers like they're a rainforest, the air crisp on her forearms.  
  
Before, when she walked into a casino, people always used to ask, "who's this chick in the white wife-beater?" (what is she doing here, what is she doing here). Now they don't bother asking.  
  
And that's how it goes: she asks for a table and they get her one, and there's money on the table and chips and the pieces of her broken rotten heart, alcohol and smoke and wind in her veins.  
  
And that's how it goes: she wins another game, because she never loses, and she leaves like a thief, green eyes tainted black under the harsh lights of a nameless casino.  
  
That's how it goes.  
  
-  
  
(And behind her back they say she's a dyke, they say once she banged Zaynah Malik – they say she won and won and when Zaynah had nothing left to bet she said she'd take her, and she was wearing a black dress, a black dress)  
  
-  
  
Liam is tall and sensible and a _lawyer_ and when she looks at Harry it's a little like she's reading her soul. It's fucking creepy, if you ask Harry. Harry used to want her at the beginning, with her clean black suits and her silent jewelry, but it dwindled down, the way most of her appetites do these days.  
  
The leather is sticking to her thighs, and she craves a cigarette, fingers itching for it, shaking. She shoves them in her pocket. She knows she can't hide, and she's not ashamed, just. She doesn’t like showing her weaknesses, is all.  
  
"You can't go on like that," Liam says, her heels clicking on the hardwood floor. The room smells like it always smells, cinnamon and incense, vaguely sickening.  
  
"Watch me," Harry answers, voice lazy and hoarse. It got like that right after she started smoking and using. She was never as strong as she thought – story of her life.  
  
Liam sighs. Harry would like to feel guilty, but she's empty, empty and bottomless, filled to the brim with broken hopes and shards of tattered screams.  
  
"You can't tell me what to do, you know."  
  
Liam's eyes are the best part of her. They don't make sense, but they're fucking beautiful – they look like dawn in an American desert, orange golden faded red ochre copper.  
  
"Trust me, I know," Liam says. ("You're just a stubborn little fucker, is what you are," she said the first time they met, and then she was just disappointed all the time, sad thick eyebrows and her arm on Harry's chest, barring the way).  
  
"There's a meeting next week," she says.  
  
She doesn't look at Harry, only hands her the paper. Harry takes it. The air flowing from the outside smells of petroleum and thick Texan heat.  
  
"I won't go," Harry says.  
  
Liam is all sad eyes and brown hair and summer vacations in the country. She's indulgent smiles and broad hands and shoulders and signing on the dotted line.  
  
"I know," she sighs (she has scars on her hips, creeping under her pressed shirts. Harry doesn't know where they're from.). "I know, Harry."  
  
"Good," Harry says.  
  
They share a smoke leaning against the windowframe of her office, barefoot. Harry feels so old, like her bones could break at any minute. It's probably the alcohol.  
  
-  
  
(Sometimes she wonders about the alcohol swirling in her bowels, glassy indigo and nasty amaranthine melting against sad beryl. She gets sick. She heaves her stomach out, her lungs, her heart, and when she thinks she can't get emptier she's always, always wrong.)  
  
-  
  
She never goes to the AA meetings. She hates the plastic cups, the comfort food, the weepy failures, the successes and their chips. She hates the compassion. She hates standing up and saying who she is. She hates taking her sunglasses off. She hates the chairs, and the people, and the light and the way it makes everyone saints, fucking pathetic saints in their smelly basements saying how sorry they are for wanting to feel a little bit better.  
  
But she breaks all her nevers like she breaks her promises, without looking back, and on Thanksgiving she gets wasted and she wins a game and then it's four in the afternoon and she's got fuck-all to do, so she goes to the meeting.  
  
It's as bad as she expected. She can't help but keep touching her dice in the back of her pocket, six, one and then three for the thunder. All the combinations are burned in her mind – it’s probably the only thing she's ever been good at.  
  
She stands up when she's asked, tired of fighting everyone for things she doesn't even care that much about (it's just that they creep on her back like ants, cold sweats and shaking and paranoia). "Hi, I'm Harry. I'm an alcoholic."  
  
(But she isn't, is she? Not really. It's just another one of her lies, and Liam only believes it because she doesn't know half-measures, only black and white and right and wrong.)  
  
AA meetings are like a game of hide and seek, try and guess who's lying, who has drunk the night before and has demons crawling on their shoulders, who decided cocaine was a better option, who's not an alcoholic but came here because Fight Club said it first.  
  
With her stormy eyes, Harry spots a girl near the drinks table. She's wiry, body taut like a piano string, nervous eyes darting around her. She's wearing a fur coat and pointy heels. Harry walks towards her in liquid strides, an undercurrent of _trouble trouble trouble_ shaking beneath her feet, electric.  
  
"What're you doing here?"  
  
The girl's eyes jump to her. Her face is nothing but that, Harry realizes: huge blue eyes like a frozen ocean. Harry can't see anything else (her lips; the curve of her jaw; the swell of her cheek and the twitch of her fingers). It's like it's gnawing at her insides, like hunger.  
  
"Louise," the girl whispers.  
  
Blue, blue and a ring of black, maybe lack of sleep or meth or smudged make-up.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Louise," the girl repeats. "That's my name."  
  
"What are you doing here?"  
  
"It's Thanksgiving." She shrugs but it's still tense, and bites sharply in her donut, leaving neat teeth marks on the tender pastry. Sugar clings to her lips, looking strangely out of place. Harry doesn't ask further – it's as good a reason as any.  
  
"What's your name?"  
  
"Does it matter?"  
  
"Yes," Louise says, and she bites over her red lipstick. "It does."  
  
They're called back to their seats, so Harry doesn't tell her her name. She wonders if she would've as she tunes out the sob stories, thumbing her dice in her pocket.  
  
-  
  
You remember winning your first game of poker? You were sixteen and at the top of the fucking world, your head up in the clouds, and you opened your arms and said, "Hell yes," drawing all the chips back to your heart. You haven't stopped winning since, but it feels like a slow fall, sliding down marble stairs and hitting your head against the hard edge at each step.  
  
-  
  
She sees Louise again, at a game. She's wearing a red dress and fake diamonds and everything looks too big for her, like she could shimmy out of it and flee if she wanted, her rabbit eyes searching for the nearest exit. She's on a mafioso's arm.  
  
"Nice," Harry smirks at him.  
  
The mafioso – his name is Nicolo – squeezes his fan of cards tighter (but it's no use, she'll win anyway). Harry could probably read it in her eyes, ten of hearts, ace of spades and the joker, if she didn't already know all that. Louise bends over Nicolo's shoulder – a photograph slips half out of her purse, a face that Harry would probably recognize if she cared.  
  
"Yeah," Nicolo says, and then: "Don't try to distract me, Styles."  
  
Harry smiles, shark-like. Behind Nicolo's back, she sees Louise's fingers slip into his jacket pocket and come out shiny, a leather wallet between her fingers.  
  
Harry watches as she strips him bare, a Glock 17, a flask, a bracelet and a leatherbound notebook. This game is a treasure hunt, Harry thinks.  
  
When she lays down her straight flush on the table, liquid wrists imposing her law, Louise is already long gone, the moving flame of her dress lost in the black swarm of the crowd.  
  
-  
  
They keep meeting after that, winning hands and petty larceny. They make a pretty couple, Harry thinks, and they never talk, only lock eyes when Louise steals, quick fingers running on automatic. It feels like foreplay. The blood in Harry's temples gets fierce and beating, drumming hot in her head, almost like music.  
  
Once the man Louise is with almost catches her and Harry surprises herself by being worried, glancing crazily at his bared teeth with _what can I do_ running on a loop in her head. But Louise is like water, always, and she's already slipped into the darkness by the time he can reach a hand.  
  
It feels like dancing, too, like dancing with fire or with the devil. _Be careful_ , says Liam when Harry tells her about the pretty thief with the lightning fingers. But of course she knows that Harry wouldn't be Harry if she were careful, so instead she says, _don't get burned_ and Harry doesn't answer _how can you burn ashes_.  
  
-  
  
(It goes like that: straight flush, four of a kind, full house, flush straight, two of a kind, two pair, one pair, high card. And back again: high card, one pair, two pair, two of a kind, flush straight, full house, four of a kind, straight flush, like a lullaby)  
  
-  
  
Once, at a game in Vegas, Louise comes up behind Harry and shoves her hips against the back of her chair, heat bleeding near. She's wearing a sapphire she stole from a Russian mob boss at her ring finger. Harry notices (she notices these things – she’s a poker player, trained to decipher the subtlest tells. She’s not the best for nothing).  
  
"Nice game," Louise says, her voice like an electric wire.  
  
"Nice ring," Harry answers without turning.  
  
The man in front of her looks irritated that she’s talking while they're playing, but she doesn’t care. Once, in Austria, she played a game in front of the Vienna Philharmonic.  
  
"You're like a magpie," she continues as she lays her cards without looking at Louise, "Right? You like shiny things?"  
  
Louise's fingers come to cover her own and for a moment they're playing together against everyone, bold and reckless and fast, like driving a Formula One. Harry feels like she’s being stricken by lightning.  
  
"Maybe," Louise says, and she winks, long lashes coated black, before disappearing once again.  
  
 _Maybe not_ , Harry completes for her.  
  
-  
  
There's another AA meeting in another basement that reeks of death and piss. Harry doesn't mean to go until she does, dragged forward by the polaroid image of Louise, neck emerging from the fur.  
  
She isn't there.  
  
Instead there are stale biscuits, kindness and the suffocation of failure. Harry leaves as soon as she can, nearly tripping over her own feet, but she isn't afraid (she isn't afraid, why would she be afraid).  
  
If she still had nightmares, she would probably see herself strapped to one of these chairs, and all her truths being forced out of her, _failure failure failure_ ringing in her ears like a police siren.  
  
-  
  
There's a night and a night and another night with a dawn in between. Harry started counting the hours with her cards when she was nineteen and she got her heart broken for the first time, along with her arm and a long scar slashed on her neck. The guy’s name was Ed. He’s not the one who broke her arm, but he’s the one who hurt her the most. He taught her poker during the long nights they spent together in his father’s garage, drinking cheap beer and cheaper vodka, laughing between kisses.  
  
For the rest, she remembers the spit on the ground, dark with blood, and that’s all. She's done a good job at forgetting everything else. The cocaine probably helped.  
  
Now Harry counts her hours when she's on the road, the dusty air climbing on the bumper and hitting her in the back through the open top of her convertible. She has a card game in her glove compartment, dog-eared corners and stained with the faces of everything she met and loved. With her dice she counts the hours until the end. Watching the random numbers roll on her palm (six, three, one) appeases her.  
  
And she watches the road, from her rearview mirror, sometimes it's like nothing had happened at all  
  
-  
  
(Queen of hearts – _is it over yet_ )  
  
-  
  
Louise is clingy like a leech.  
  
Everywhere Harry goes, she is, hysteric laugh crackling at the corners of her lips, or with an ankle bracelet that glimmers in the night; once she wears a scarf that keeps winding around her throat like a snake, like it's trying to strangle her. She’s pretty and jittery, and at night she goes out in bars she probably shouldn’t, laughing off Harry’s warnings (Harry doesn’t warn people).  
  
She makes Harry her accomplice, but by the time Harry notices it's too late, way too late, they've been to hell and back together and the way Louise licks her lips when she lays her treasures before her, long fingers still thrumming, has something twisted that makes volcanoes erupt at the pit of Harry's stomach.  
  
"You like it, you know you like it," Louise says one night as they're pressed against each other, tasting of mint and betrayal.  
  
It's the first thing she's said in months, and Harry lets her kiss the last shreds of sanity out of her lips, doesn't bother to deny.  
  
-  
  
Harry finds Louise on a sidewalk, with a leather jacket wrapped tight around her shoulders, smoking. Her make-up is smudged. She’s a little ugly, and her hands are like claws in her pockets, clutching her haul.  
  
For some reason, Harry sits next to her. For another one, they talk.  
  
(and it all rolls, nausea in your bowels, you've been to school in Indiana where you've learned about cutting classes and lounging behind the school, lungful of smoke smothering your hopes of cities and buildings scraping the sky)  
  
She passes Harry the joint and Harry sucks the embers in, love dying on her tongue, listens to Louise say:  
  
(it's like retching on a dry stomach, I was raised by my silent mother in the UK and I tried stealing the rain from the sky while I got my briefs down and let a nameless boy pound into me and plunder all my treasures against a damp tree trunk)  
  
And she never believes a word. Harry knows liars.  
  
-  
  
Harry's life is a collection of moments. Louise becomes the moments that sting, the backrooms foggy with smoke, glitter sticking to her cheekbones.  
  
"I still don't know your name," she says, her eyes shining like stolen gems.  
  
Harry doesn't want to tell her. A foreboding weighs on her stomach, the fear that Louise will steal her name and won't give it back. (But she doesn't believe in ghosts, she's Harry Styles). Her gums feel numb – she unclenches her teeth.  
  
"Harry.”  
  
Louise smiles with her teeth. "Hi, Harry. what do you do?" she asks in a little girl's voice, holding her hand out for Harry to shake. She’s a little ridiculous, but Harry is mesmerized.  
  
"I play poker."  
  
Louise cocks her head. (She's wearing a necklace that Harry saw around Zaynah's neck once, sitting crookedly on her collarbones. Oh, the irony, Harry thinks with no real reason.)  
  
"You shouldn't," she says, vowels shrill with her disguise.  
  
"Why?"  
  
"You know what happens when you play these games," she says, dragging the word on her tongue like Hector around Troy.  
  
Harry shouldn't be hanging to her lips, but she is, oh, is she.  
  
"That’s what happens," Louise continues, leaning in, her voice a mousy whisper. "Everyone always loses."  
  
-  
  
(Rumor has it you're the one who has fallen in love)  
  
-  
  
And one day, just like she came, Louise leaves.  
  
Harry doesn't see her for one day, then for a month, and suddenly she’s playing her games without Louise's hands flying in front of her like white birds, their necks heavy with jewels. Suddenly there's no reason to go to these meetings, no glimpse of Louise's wiry bones sliding beneath the skin.  
  
 _It's lonely_ , Harry thinks one night as she lays another winning hand, the casino buzzing around her.  
  
She catches a glimpse of a blond woman in a dress and a black eye, beautiful and quietly damaged. She remembers waking up next to her with a sour taste in her mouth, “bastard” shot from the darkness like a curse.  
  
Then, a beat too late, she remembers why she used to love poker, because she never used to feel alone.  
  
But she takes her heavy glass from the table, weighing in her hand like the first stone of a cathedral, and she clinks it against her opponent's. Her teeth are clenched.  
  
"May the best man win," he says in a Chinese accent. She nods and takes a sip.  
  
-  
  
(Where did she go? You've watched too many movies, you think she's in a car with a gun and sunglasses and dust catching in her smile. You've watched too many movies, kid. You know how it is here, when people leave, when people leave, when people leave they're gone, that's all there is to it.)  
  
-  
  
She isn't even drinking when Liam comes. She listens to the warm roar of the car as she cuts the cards, watching the same figures appear at random intervals.  
  
"You're back," Liam says, shrugging off her jacket. Her shoulders shoot out, soft and white.  
  
"Yes," Harry answers.  
  
(Two of clubs – _she isn't, really, and it's midnight in california_ )  
  
There's a glass of bourbon sitting untouched on the bar, golden amber diffracting the light.  
  
"You shouldn't drink so much," Liam says, thick eyebrows drawn together. She's still holding her briefcase, but her hair is down – she probably just left work.  
  
"You shouldn't _care_ so much," Harry retorts, unsure of whether she means it to be a reproach or a warning.  
  
The _but we do_ goes unspoken. Liam sighs and goes to the kitchen to set the kettle. The familiar sounds ground Harry: the faucet running, the dull whisper of the gas, water boiling. They scream _Liam_.  
  
"It didn't work out, then," Liam says when they're sitting, tea warming their palms, honey sugar and milk around them like a porcelain court.  
  
"When does it ever," Harry answers.  
  
Liam nods. For once, it doesn't mean yes or no.  
  
-  
  
There's a lavomatic in Kentucky, near Covington, with its faded pink walls and coins clinking noisily when they fall into the roaring machine. It looks like any other lavomatic, and Harry doesn't know why she's here, stumbling through the door, a ratty ship mooring drunkenly, without permission.  
  
But it's where she finds Louise.  
  
She's sitting in a plastic chair, her legs folded under her. The coins shine briefly when they disappear up her sleeve.  
  
"Hi, love," she says, as if she hadn't been gone for six months, as if she'd never left. "I missed you."  
  
Harry had never been tongue-tied before, when she used to be a poker queen, with a silver tongue and hungry eyes made for prowling.  
  
Louise stands up. The coins fall on the floor, jingling when they hit the tiles, Louise's heels go click-clack, and altogether it sounds like acid raining on Harry's heart.  
  
"Hi, darling," Louise repeats somewhere near her mouth, smelling like cheap lipstick, and then they're kissing like it's their last day on earth.  
  
(The camera's seen it all: the first time you had sex with Louise was in a lavomatic in Kentucky with her dirty palms pressed against your stomach and your fingers deep inside her, blood and grime out of a Tarantino movie.)  
  
-  
  
(Sex with Louise is pretty much how Harry imagines setting herself on fire would feel like. It's _too much_ , skin burning red under the pads of her fingers and her teeth and her nails, it's colors blooming and sounds like volcanoes.  
  
It feels _wrong_ , it ends too soon, and if Harry was given the choice she would do it all over again, every searing kiss, every wave of feeling, every whispered confession.)  
  
-  
  
Louise makes her climb a hill, urging her up when Harry falters, laughing. Harry is exhausted when they reach the top, smoker lungs on fire and mouth full of dust. (She feels like she's visited all of America with Louise, the dives and the lavomatics and the deserts and the casinos and the red hills).  
  
She wonders absently how Louise can look beautiful with sweat dripping on her shoulders, staining the back of her dress. It’s a bit unfair. Harry wants to lay her down and take her until there's nothing left, until she can't breathe. She closes her eyes.  
  
"We're here," Louise says.  
  
Harry opens her eyes. The sun is bursting in front of her, staining the sky red. Harry's heart feels like a sickly bird, wings fluttering in her fragile ribcage.  
  
They let the minutes pass them by, lying on the ground next to each other. Louise is playing with Harry's dice; she probably stole them from Harry's pocket when she wasn't looking. She has whisky in a flask and they pass it between them lazily, fingers brushing. Louise's gaudy pink nails scratch Harry's skin.  
  
"Let's play a game," Louise says with an enigmatic smile.  
  
Harry thinks of what Liam would say. "Okay," she answers.  
  
Louise chuckles and draws a gun out of her jacket. "I'm sure you know the rules," she says.  
  
Harry swallows; nods. Louise hands her the round. Her eyes are blown and wide, blue as ever, the heart of a flame.  
  
"Go on," Louise says, her voice a straining whisper, "you can start."  
  
In her mouth, it sounds like she's doing Harry a favor.  
  
(You take a moment to think: a second, and all the people you've loved, this time when you were a child and your father got you to suck his fingers clean of honey, all the bones you've broken, the Hollywood sunsets, your dice. You think about counting the hours until the end, and you watch them turn between Louise's nails, numbers blurring.)  
  
"Go on," Louise presses. "Do it."  
  
(She likes these childish games.)  
  
Harry breathes. She's done it before – roll the barrel, nuzzle it against your temple, _Alea jacta est_.  
  
She presses the trigger.  
  
-  
  
The aftermath is probably the scariest part. Louise does it too, shorts movements that feel rehearsed (lock the barrel, press the trigger, one two) and laughs when her head doesn't explode, pointy teeth pressing down against the skin of her lip.  
  
"Next time," she says, sounding almost disappointed.  
  
Harry can understand why you would be eager to die.  
  
They run down the hill, heels kicking the red dust. Louise lets the dice tumble from one hand to the other. They never fall.  
  
They get the car - it kickstarts with an animal roar, and here they go, it's being a teenager all over again, gun tucked in Louise's jacket, safety off. It’s being drunk but better, more, shinier. It’s America, big and brash with its fucking dreams sparkling in the sky, laughing with an open throat, adrenalin running.  
  
They drive and drive and drive and Harry would probably think of somewhere to go if the rattle of the metal wasn't still ringing in her head, and someone else wasn’t driving her car.  
  
-  
  
They talk, after that. It was probably time.  
  
("Why do you steal?"  
  
Louise always smokes in short drags, in out, in out, fifteen seconds flat.  
  
"I don't steal.")  
  
("Do you want to live forever?"  
  
She's bouncing on her heels, bracelets glittering gold and silver around her wrists. It's confusing, the way she can be so inconspicuous and then so loud in the same minute. She's confusing.  
  
"I don't -"  
  
"I do," Louise interrupts her.  
  
Harry doesn't know what she's answering to, but she isn't sure it matters.)  
  
("What about death? Are you afraid of it?"  
  
Harry doesn't know if she's afraid of death. She thinks she isn't, but sometimes she wakes up in a stranger’s bed with a pounding heart and damp armpits and thinks, _it's coming, it’s soon_.  
  
"I worry, sometimes."  
  
Louise nods. She looks strangely wise. "Yeah,” she says, “I have monsters, too.")  
  
("That's Zaynah, on your photograph? Zaynah Malik?"  
  
Louise nods. "Yeah. We used to be friends."  
  
Harry thinks, _do you know she tastes like smoke and victory?_  
  
"She's beautiful," she says instead.  
  
Louise lunges forward, keen on devouring her. Jealousy sparks green and golden.)  
  
(Again. The sky is darker.  
  
"Why do you steal?"  
  
"I can't help it."  
  
There could be grass under their feet, but it's all asphalt, black and sticky, melting in the sun.)  
  
-  
  
(Seven of diamonds – _I can't win_ )  
  
-  
  
The first time Harry loses a game it's Louise's fault.  
  
They're sitting next to each other at a table, elbows on the green. Louise's fingers are slipping in and out of her, silent moans strangling Harry's vocal chords. It feels so fucking good, and Harry is writhing, a little wanton. It’s probably obvious, but she doesn’t care. Louise likes the obviousness, the blatant obscenity. Their veins are full of alcohol and smoke, all the blood pumping in their crazy hearts.  
  
And then she loses.  
  
And she doesn't care at first, you see, maybe that's the worst of it, the way she says 'never mind' and tosses the cards on the table (two of spades, king of clubs and she could've won, she can always win), drags Louise in the red elevator, the way they kiss drunkenly and fuck like it's the end of the world.  
  
(It's after, when she's sitting on her bed in the dark, white body marred with the traces of her cannibal love, that she replays it in her head. Every hand, and it's like a freefall, foreboding strong at the pit of her stomach, _oh no, no, no, no._ )  
  
Of course it's her fault.  
  
They don’t break up after that. Harry isn’t even sure if they’re together, but it feels like it, feels like something she can’t get out of. Harry doesn’t try. She’s never dealt well with her addictions, anyway.  
  
-  
  
Louise robs things from Harry, the flesh on her flanks and the breath from her lungs, small trinkets and jewels. She takes her apart piece by piece, her sanity and her anger and then the scar folded on the small of her back. Harry sees it in her glacier eyes, the constant thrum of _until she's bare_ , but she doesn't run away.  
  
She lets herself be unravelled, soft wool spilling as Louise draws all her secrets out of her, endless sunsets spent telling her about every wound, this time and the year when, this summer. Louise sits and takes. She’s greedy, Louise.  
  
And then there are the moments of silence, when Louise makes her come undone and Harry tries to put her back together, opposite forces working in vain. They always fail, but it's trying, the rosy nub of a nipple blooming out of a hand like a flower, the small shivers, the moans – it's trying that makes it worth it.  
  
"Don't stop," Harry says when Louise kisses her, a hand splayed across her cheek, their naked bodies pressed together. They probably couldn’t be closer if they tried.  
  
Louise runs her finger along her naked spine. Each brush of her fingers unlocks a vertebra – she only leaves wrecks in her wake.  
  
"Don't stop," she repeats.  
  
Louise traces paths across Harry's shoulders. Harry thinks distantly about how good she used to be at bluffing, and then she lets herself fall down the edge, body rocking, white.  
  
-  
  
Louise is sitting on a bed in a hotel in America, hands full of her latest spoils. Harry watches her. She’s waiting. There’s never a _now_ with Louise, only a _what happens next_. Once again, she wonders what they’re doing together, if that’s what they are, together, and when she doesn’t find her answer, she dips a cigarette in the moving flame of her lighter.  
  
“We should do something,” says Louise. Harry can feel her body thrumming next to her, hot and juvenile.  
  
“Hm,” she answers. It’s not a yes, and it’s not a no. It’s probably the best answer to anything Louise says, crafted especially for her.  
  
“We should go to Burning Man,” Louise says.  
  
(Her voice is like a symphony or a tide, rising, rising until it spills.)  
  
“Okay,” Harry says. It’s useless to say no to Louise.  
  
Harry watches her as she stands up, unfolding her sinuous body. She could count the things she knows about her on the fingers of one hand, and yet, yet – there is something there, that Harry can’t pinpoint, that holds them together, the iron-wrung clasp of an old necklace or maybe their fear of solitude.  
  
They go. It feels like the seventies, grabbing a bottle of water and a red kiss, stopping before Liam’s house and convincing her to come too, hair down, Liam, hair down, laughing and drinking and listening to the Kinks on the car’s shitty radio.  
  
It’s in moments like that that Louise stops being fascinating and starts being beautiful. Harry can’t decide how she prefers her, but there is something to be said for happiness, its uplifting lightness, the soft wind blowing over them and tangling Louise’s hair. Harry breathes in deep. (Her dice weigh heavy in her pocket, and for a moment, forgetting about her addictions, she considers throwing them out of the rolled-down window, to tumble on the smooth black road.)  
  
Louise nuzzles her neck. “We’re good, yeah?” She asks. Her smile is too wide, too white, too true even when she lies.  
  
Harry leans down to kiss her and sighs when their lips meet, sweat and plastic lipstick. “Yeah,” she mumbles against Louise’s lips, hand loosely cradling her nape. “We’re good.”  
  
Liam laughs from the front seat. This changes her too, and Harry is in awe of how different she is, wonders if it’s the same for her.  
  
“You look good, Liam,” she says with something like wonder.  
  
“And fuck, do I feel good,” Liam answers, her mouth open to laugh.  
  
They sing along with the radio, eyes fixed on the road that stretches before them, screaming of America.  
  
-  
  
Burning Man is pretty much the madness that Harry expected. Louise jumps out of the car as soon as they get there, barefoot in the sand. The Black Rock Desert is open and burning around them, throngs of painted people wandering between the fires.  
  
"It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Louise breathes. She’s been there before, and Harry tries to imagine her, free of their strange love and maybe captive of another one, arms thrown open and screaming in laughter.  
  
She closes her eyes and breathes in, trying to rid herself of the old scents (green mat; nervous sweat beading between eyebrows; metal and alcohol).  
  
“Yeah,” she says, tugging Louise closer for as long as she allows (it isn’t long; Louise isn’t one to be held down).  
  
But it’s crazy, it’s just like the rest – maybe it’s easier to get lost in here, because there are people all over doing just that, even if it isn’t the same type of insanity, of mad elation, but that’s all. Harry can’t find it in herself to mind. She was a goner from the start, anyway.  
  
(Liam is dancing somewhere, limbs flying and hair askew. Harry doesn’t know her, but she’s beautiful, heavy golden breasts visible through her shirt, dancing with the crowd, her cheeks scarred with glow-in-the-dark neon paint, a punk Indian goddess twisting and sliding, head thrown back.)  
  
And Louise, Louise is on a platform holding torches, looking so profoundly _happy_ with the torn strap of her dress falling on her shoulder, so pure, so remote – Harry knows, at that moment, not for the first time, that she won’t ever have her. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter then and it doesn’t matter when, later, a red-faced Louise kneels down before her and rises hands full of the night’s spoils, psychedelic necklaces and torn bills, drugs and lighters.  
  
“I love you,” she says fervently, her eyes blown.  
  
(Harry has been dancing too. She’s been dancing in a desert with a hungry crowd pressed against her, trying to commit to eternal memory the taste of humanity that seeped into her skin.)  
  
Harry’s fingers twitch for a cigarette or a card game.  
  
“Me too.”  
  
Louise laughs, and she’s probably in another world, dreaming of fabulous creatures being set on fire under the cheers, but Harry feels like she’s laughing at her, saying _what a fool_.  
  
“What a fool,” Harry repeats, ignoring Louise’s confused eyes, and she smiles, because she’s always been a fool, and nothing ever feels better.  
  
-  
  
(Knight of spades - _'cause I will be the death of you_ )  
  
-  
  
There’s nothing that Harry loves more than the hurried nights, when dawn is pushing against the edge of the moon but she’s still holding on, the stench of smoke in dark back alleys where everything could happen. It’s what drove her here, she remembers. Sixteen and her gangster heart.  
  
And now – now she’s got a girl on her forearms, hauled up against the bricks, her tongue and her teeth on Harry’s neck and precise hands undoing Harry almost methodically. But now it’s love pounding strong in her breast and love just as strong responding on the other side of this trembling united flesh, a lone heartbeat bouncing off the bones of two ribcages.  
  
“Here, here,” Louise is whispering, but it could be anything – they still don’t know each other, Harry thinks, after having learned everything by heart.  
  
“Take -”  
  
Harry is almost sure she meant to say something, but she clamps her teeth down on her lip, hard, maybe hard enough to draw blood, and it’s just as well. It’s something, seeing her like that, eyes rolling at the back of her head, clenching and releasing. It’s dirty and it’s obscene with a shade of beautiful.  
  
Her head falls on Harry’s chest, knees blown, hair sticking to her forehead with sweat. She looks debauched.  
  
“Take this,” she says, and with agile fingers she slips something into Harry’s hand. “It’s a gift.”  
  
She hasn’t lost her old habits. Here she is, still fleeing – but this time she’s leaving something behind, heavy in Harry’s palm, almost like a promise.  
  
-  
  
(They say you’re whipped, kid, and your love’s like dynamite)  
  
-  
  
Harry finds out about Louise in the paper.  
  
It really all happens by chance, the dominoes collapsing – Louise sometimes leaves for a week or two and comes back when she pleases, because really she’s an errant street cat with a manic smile, and Harry doesn’t read the newspaper, but she does that day.  
  
It’s in a corner, with a photograph, written in clean curvy ink with all the appropriate capitals. _Young woman killed by mob boss in Las Vegas_ , it says, and then a picture of Louise.  
  
If Harry ever wondered what Louise would look like with a bullet in the head, here is her answer.  
  
She closes the newspaper. Takes a sip of whatever she was drinking, and it burns as it goes down in her throat. _Don’t break_ , she thinks, shaking, her fingers drawing frantic rhythms on the glass.  
  
-  
  
(They say your love speaks between clenched teeth)  
  
-  
  
(“But what did they say?”  
  
“It’s over, Harry. Let it go.”  
  
“Why did they kill her?”  
  
“Something she had stolen, a watch, I think, it doesn’t matter, just -”  
  
“Don’t, Liam.”)  
  
-  
  
Harry has counted the hours with her cards for as long as she can remember. As far as she’s concerned, she was born at sixteen, with a cigarette and a straight flush, sitting in the hay with her best friend turned lover.  
  
Now she also has a watch. It always slides on her forearm and comes to bump against the vein on the inside of her wrist, face up. Harry likes it. It has tiny diamonds on the hands, and with it, she counts the hours until the end.  
  
Six, three, one.  
  
-  
  
You know her? Harry Styles, that’s her name, and she’s never lost a game of poker.  
  
  
  



End file.
